With the midterms just under six weeks away, more Republican candidates are coming to the belated realization that, if they want to save their seats, they could perhaps use some distance from the very unpopular president whose approval is reaching new lows.

Now, after a decade in which President Donald Trump has demanded — and increasingly received — near-total loyalty from his parties’ candidates and congressional delegation, and used his bully pulpit to launch harsh personal attacks on Republicans who don’t provide it, such distancing attempts remain cautious and limited.

But they are growing more common. And this isn’t just in the toughest blue territory — even Republicans in states or districts Trump won overwhelmingly are now rushing to emphasize how they don’t agree with the president on some of his most controversial and unpopular agenda items. 

“It’s only natural that candidates would seek to create distance from Trump, especially on issues — like the Iran war — that are unpopular,” GOP strategist Douglas Heye told me. “That doesn’t guarantee success, and can be a hard needle to thread, but it’s the natural play.”

For now, the primary motivator is political. But today’s election-year cracks could be signs of larger breaks later, especially as Republicans look toward life without the singular figure who’s dominated the last decade-plus of party politics. 

A party running away from major parts of the lame-duck president’s agenda today might be repudiating parts of his legacy tomorrow — with potentially major implications for governance. And if Trump’s record is truly deemed a failure by Republicans, the GOP’s future will be wide open.

Where the general election cracks are starting to show

The boldest break in recent weeks has been from Rep. María Elvira Salazar of Florida, who represents a heavily Hispanic Miami-Dade County district that Trump won solidly in 2024. 

Last week, Salazar released a campaign ad in which she spoke directly to the camera and addressed Trump, saying: “Mr. President, some of your immigration enforcement efforts have gone too far.” She added: “The same Hispanics that helped you get to the White House in 2024 feel betrayed today.”

The ad was the most dramatic sign yet that Trump’s ongoing polling collapse with Latino voters — a critical component of his 2024 coalition — is showing up for Republican campaigns as well. As Salazar’s ad suggested, many swing voters interpreted Trump’s “mass deportation” talk as a promise to clamp down on border crossings and remove dangerous criminals — not to patrol the streets with militarized operations going after otherwise law-abiding migrants, many of whom have established ties to the community. If the backlash proves real in places like Florida and Texas, it could affect how future Republicans approach the issue.

That same week, two incumbent House members in Iowa in tough races decided to let their votes tell the tale. Reps. Mariannette Miller-Meeks and Zach Nunn both voted for a resolution to end Trump’s war in Iran, and each posted on social media that they opposed an “open-ended war.”  

Vice President JD Vance, who reports suggest was privately opposed to the decision to launch the military operation, mentioned at the Republican convention in Dallas that slain conservative activists Charlie Kirk “hated war,” but stuck with Trump even when he disagreed — an apparent plea to wavering Trump voters to do the same.

Polls show strong opposition to the war among the public, and if it continues to be a drag on GOP candidates, that could strengthen the currently embattled faction of the GOP that urges caution about foreign entanglements. On Tuesday, two more Republicans — Rep. Tom Tiffany, running for governor of Wisconsin, and Sen. Jon Husted, running for Senate in Ohio — publicly said it was time to bring the war to an end. (Husted caveated this by saying that ending the conflict would require a deal with Iran, and that he wouldn’t vote for the congressional resolution to end the war.)

Wisconsin GOP candidate for governor Rep. Tom Tiffany today on rising gas prices and Iran: "I just believe we should be exiting Iran, that it's time to move on … Time to come home, take care of business here in America." pic.twitter.com/oHo1QjiGDr

— Matt Smith (@mattsmith_news) September 22, 2026

Rep. Ashley Hinson, who is the GOP’s Senate nominee in Iowa, has also been cautiously seeking a bit more distance from Trump by, for instance, opposing his plan to cut tariffs on foreign beef imports since it would increase competition for local cattle ranchers, the New York Times recently reported.

Sen. Roger Marshall in Kansas, facing a reelection race that polls suggest is surprisingly competitive, has publicly criticized Trump’s tariffs on aluminum and steel, saying they hurt businesses in his state.

Even two members of the right-wing House Freedom Caucus who are both running for governor — Tiffany in Wisconsin and Rep. Byron Donalds in Florida — are making similar rhetorical adjustments. 

Tiffany disagreed with Trump renaming Lake Ontario “Lake America,” an action taken as part of Trump’s overwhelmingly unpopular trade war with Canada. And Donalds removed many mentions and pictures of the president from his website this week, the Miami Herald reported (replacing a pledge to “Enact the Trump Agenda” with one to focus on “affordability”).

This isn’t entirely a new phenomenon. Some Republicans in blue states or districts — like Sen. Susan Collins of Maine and Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania — have long tried to play up their disagreements with Trump, to position themselves as independent voices. 

But many other candidates are still clinging tightly to Trump. “I am still with that guy,” Michael Whatley, the GOP Senate nominee in North Carolina, said at a rally with Trump last week. Ken Paxton, running for Senate in Texas, is similarly sticking by Trump (despite Trump’s constant digs at how Paxton dresses). It doesn’t hurt that Trump’s super PAC could be a critical player in theirs, and others’, races.

And when GOP candidates do try to stress their independence, it typically comes in the form of saying they disagree with the president on a particular issue that’s going over poorly in their state or district — most often either tariffs, the Iran war, or immigration.

The GOP candidates’ double bind

Through much of the Trump era, Republicans have faced a powerful incentive to minimize openly breaking with the president — because they feared Trump would be vindictive enough to use his bully pulpit against them, as he has against his GOP critics in the past.

Strategically, candidates face a double bind, as stressing their independence from Trump can theoretically help with swing voters who have soured on the president, but it also could hurt turnout among the Trump-loyal base.

“It’s a fine line to walk,” GOP pollster Whit Ayres told me. “You don’t want to look like you’re being disloyal to a Republican president, because you could end up with a Truth Social tweet that would destroy the support of Republicans who like Donald Trump for your campaign.”

For Republicans in redder states or districts, Trump’s engagement could still be their candidates’ greatest asset — he could help spur them to go to the polls and help frame the midterm contest in purely partisan terms.

“Motivation in midterm cycles matters a lot,” Patrick Ruffini, a pollster at Echelon Insights, recently posted on X. Ruffini’s argument is that, due to the Senate map and gerrymandering in the House, many more competitive seats this cycle are in states Trump won big. So, he argued, “raising Republicans’ motivation to vote will go further than it did in 2018 because of the political terrain this election is being fought on.”

But if Trump’s approval is reaching new lows, that calculus could change — even in redder areas. A Reuters/Ipsos poll released Monday found Trump’s approval at 32 percent, the worst result in that poll since Trump entered politics.

That could explain the new round of distancing we’ve been seeing in recent weeks. And if the polling bears out and the party does end up suffering substantial losses, it could potentially hasten that trend, as Republicans grow more wary of tying themselves tightly to an 80-year-old who won’t be on the ballot again. 

Should Democrats regain control of the House, Senate, or both, there would be no shortage of votes they could call to test just how far Republicans are willing to break with Trump on issues like immigration, tariffs, and the war. It could also create a difficult position for the next Republican presidential nominee — especially if it’s Trump’s own vice president — as they seek to incorporate lessons from the backlash without offending Trump.

For his part, Trump has been relatively restrained in response to all this, perhaps recognizing what a difficult political situation his party is in. Asked by reporters about Salazar’s ad Friday, he called her “a nice person” but “a little bit softer on the border.” 

But he couldn’t resist adding: “Without me, she wouldn’t have gotten elected.”

As the heads of leading artificial intelligence companies came together last weekend to warn that runaway AI development could lead to catastrophic outcomes, momentum briefly seemed to be building for regulatory action from Washington.

But one connected and influential tech industry figure has become the leading voice opposing many proposals for government action — on his podcast, in media appearances, and in his private advice to President Donald Trump, who now calls AI doomsday fears a “hoax.”

David Sacks is a venture capitalist and part of the “PayPal Mafia” who, in recent years, has exemplified the rightward shift of some in the tech sector. He advised Elon Musk on his takeover of Twitter in 2022, and regularly unleashes a stream of scornful commentary about Democrats on social media and on the podcast All-In, which he co-hosts with three other venture capitalists. 

And for anyone wondering why Trump seems so newly dug-in against AI safety warnings — and against government action that might slow down the runaway technology before people might get hurt — Sacks is right at the center of the conversation. When Politico asked this week about Trump’s newly vocal hostility to AI safety, a senior White House official said: “David Sacks. It’s all coming from him.”

Yet Sacks’s role in the debate is an unusual one. Though he champions the AI industry, he’s no fan of the US’s two biggest AI companies. In his years in the tech industry, he’s made powerful allies, as well as many enemies — technology investor Paul Graham once posted that Sacks may be “the most evil person in Silicon Valley” (in response, Sacks called him a bully and made insinuations of antisemitism). His role, and ideology, are a window into how complex the politics and geopolitical stakes of the AI race really are — as well as how Trump administration policy is often shaped less by agency policy processes than by who has the president’s ear.

After endorsing and fundraising for Trump in 2024 — “I love David’s house, what a house,” Trump said after a fundraiser at Sacks’s $20 million San Francisco mansion) — Sacks was rewarded with a job as the White House’s “artificial intelligence and crypto czar.” There, he helped steer policy until stepping down this past March. He still co-chairs a presidential technology board, and his influence persists — in May, the Washington Post reported that a phone call from Sacks to Trump temporarily derailed the planned signing of an executive order on AI. (Vox reached out to Sacks for this article, but he declined to comment.)

Sacks is not the only Trump adviser thinking about AI: Other top administration officials, like Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Chief of Staff Susie Wiles have reportedly been more concerned about the risks of new AI tools for hacking, and have been trying to establish a government body that could help oversee the industry and address these risks.

But, so far, Trump has rejected this approach, and stayed much closer to the Sacks position. In a flurry of Truth Social posts Monday, he argued that AI would be “the Greatest Economic Development Engine in History,” said that the US had to “win” against China in the AI race, and dismissed concerns AI would “destroy the World” as a “hoax.”

To understand the implications of Sacks’s influence, you have to understand his position in the Silicon Valley AI ecosystem. In conversations with AI policy insiders, it becomes clear that many view his position through the lens of both his history as a tech investor, as well as his sharp-elbowed and take-no-prisoners style.

The split he embodies isn’t just about AI safety, but a fundamental divide over which business model of AI should succeed — one that pits Sacks directly against the biggest AI companies driving the safety debate.

Sacks is pro-AI — but he’s at odds with Anthropic and OpenAI

Sacks has generally been opposed to new regulation of AI companies by the government. His preferred approach, he’s frequently said, is to “let them cook.” He wants to let tech companies march ahead, and argues that government intervention would squelch innovation. “It’s this very libertarian approach to America winning in AI,” said Chris McGuire, a senior fellow at Council on Foreign Relations who worked on tech policy for President Joe Biden’s National Security Council, of Sacks’s approach.

That puts Sacks in opposition to AI safety advocates, who argue that regulation is necessary to rein in an increasingly dangerous technology. Indeed, even the leading AI company CEOs — Dario Amodei, Sam Altman, and even Sacks’s friend Elon Musk — have called for a slowdown in advanced AI development because of these dangers.

But Sacks has tended to dismiss warnings such as that of former Anthropic employee Jacob Coxon as “doomer histrionics.” Of late, he’s also argued that if Anthropic and OpenAI are worried that their products are dangerous, that’s on them. “If the unreleased models are scary enough that you think you should slow down, I support your decision to be responsible,” Sacks posted on X on Saturday. 

Indeed, though Sacks is often shorthanded as pro-AI, he’s in some key ways been quite critical of the leading AI labs, OpenAI and Anthropic, themselves.

That’s partly because he’s aligned with a different faction in Silicon Valley. Sacks and key allies like Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg want much more AI development from many more places, by way of models that are “open weight” or “open source.” These models make their parameters (“weights”) publicly available, in contrast to the flagship proprietary models of OpenAI and Anthropic. 

“Keeping innovation decentralized and accessible is the key to avoiding an unsafe and dystopian future where advanced AI capabilities are centralized and controlled by only a few hands,” Sacks posted on X earlier month. He has accused companies like Anthropic of trying to “kneecap open source” with regulation.

Proponents of open models hope advanced AI becomes something more like a widely available resource that individual users and companies can download, run themselves, and customize to their internal specifications — rather than having to go through a handful of companies that control access. “The defining questions of our age are who will have access to superintelligence and what will we direct it towards,” Zuckerberg wrote in August. “Will it be centralized and restricted to a few institutions, or will it be a tool that empowers everyone?”

There’s a lot of money riding on this bet. Huang’s Nvidia manufactures chips used to train AI models and would like more customers (and just this month agreed to buy Hugging Face, a repository of open models). Zuckerberg’s Meta has hoped to be the US leader in open model development. 

More broadly, software startup founders and the venture capitalists who fund them can benefit from powerful open weight AI being widely available, since it’s a cheaper alternative to OpenAI and Anthropic’s expensive products. Sacks, as a co-founder of the venture capitalist firm Craft Ventures, and host of a popular podcast with three fellow venture capitalists, is more closely tied to this part of the tech ecosystem than any other.

Many believe that capable open weight AI presents a serious threat to the Big Two AI companies’ current dominance of the AI frontier, and thus their business model. The flip side is that some have argued that the Big Two present an “existential threat” to the software industry, predicting the frontier labs’ products could take over much of what today’s software companies do.

But regarding safety concerns, advocates have warned about the dangers of both closed “frontier” models and open models. “On the open source side in particular, it’s easier to have a bad actor — a terrorist group, a rogue nation, an extremist political group that wants to cause chaos,” said Brendan Steinhauser of the Alliance for Secure AI, an AI safety advocacy group. “They can strip out safety features and guardrails, they can do some fine tuning to basically make the models even more dangerous, and get them to help them develop biological weapons.”

The open weight AI faction argues, though, that intrusive government regulation on AI would end up mostly hurting open models and the companies that use them — entrenching the dominance of OpenAI and Anthropic, who would be better able to comply with onerous safety requirements given their size. They’ve publicly pooh-poohed AI’s existential risks, instead playing up what they say are the dangers that AI’s power will be controlled by a privileged few. Less regulation, Sacks argues, will let more flowers bloom.

These concerns aren’t only held by those with financial stakes. There’s also a school of thought on the left that is deeply suspicious of OpenAI and Anthropic’s intentions, and particularly around the companies’ desire for an exemption from antitrust enforcement, which they say will let them work together to address safety. 

Commentator Matt Stoller has argued that those warning about dangerous “superintelligence” are playing into the hands of tech “oligarchs.” And a recent American Prospect article said policymakers should “avoid codifying the preferences of the very companies who are generating the panic.” On the right, Sens. Josh Hawley (R-MO) and Ted Cruz (R-TX) have expressed similar concerns that large AI companies’ demands for restrictions are a cover for consolidating market dominance. 

At a Politico event Wednesday — and to give a sense of just how strange the bedfellows can be around this issue — Sacks stressed that he agreed with former Democratic FTC chair Lina Khan that existing liability law already applies to AI companies. But while Khan said she was open to adding new legal restrictions, Sacks is arguing that existing law is perfectly sufficient for addressing safety risks. “These CEOs are going to be subject to massive civil and criminal liability if they put out products that are unsafe,” he said.

In other comments at the event, Sacks did appear to have softened his tone a bit, saying he was “open to ideas” about AI safety, and that “we should have an intelligent conversation” about how to manage risks. The problem, he argued, was that “what’s going on right now is a fear campaign” that makes such an intelligent conversation impossible.

Former Rep. Brad Carson, who heads Americans for Responsible Innovation, an AI safety advocacy group, said that Sacks has been the one preventing such a conversation. “When it comes to AI policy the Trump administration has, through their unwillingness to even talk about reasonable guardrails, brought things to such a crisis point that the industry is in jeopardy,” Carson said. “In many ways, David Sacks is the author of that ill-fated intransigence.”

Sacks, for his part, has pointed to Anthropic’s funding of much of the AI safety advocacy world — for instance, the company has given $40 million to an advocacy group founded by Carson — and said the company is “running a sophisticated regulatory capture strategy based on fear-mongering.”

If we’re in an AI race with China, why are some of Trump’s policies friendly to Chinese AI?

The influence of Sacks and his worldview could help explain another seeming mystery of the administration: If Trump thinks it’s so crucial that the United States beats China in the AI race, why has he been so willing to bless the sale of AI chips abroad — including even to China?

National security hawks both inside and outside the Trump administration had warned against these sales and hoped to impose stringent controls on the export of Nvidia chips, fearing that if too many got out, the US would squander its AI lead over China.

Huang lobbied intensely against this, hoping to sell Nvidia’s most advanced chips to Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates — and trying to resume sales of a less advanced but still sophisticated AI chip to China itself. Sacks became Huang’s biggest champion inside the administration — and they won over the president. Sacks publicly argued that blocking US chip sales to China and other countries would provide an opening for Chinese companies like Huawei to dominate their domestic market and gain a greater global market share with competing chips, putting the US on weaker footing in the long run.

National security-minded critics disagreed, arguing that Sacks’s particular vision for AI will likely, in practice, strengthen China’s AI sector. “I think we can have a reasonable debate on domestic policy,” said McGuire of the Council on Foreign Relations. “But when we start from the premise that the American AI stack — models, cloud, and chips — should be dominant globally, then selling China the technology to advance its own capability obviously undercuts that.”

China also looms over the cause of open weight AI that Sacks champions — because it’s Chinese companies like DeepSeek and Moonshot that produce some of the leading open weight models that US software startups currently use.

OpenAI and Anthropic argue that these Chinese models present national security risks, claim they rely heavily on copying or “distilling” their own models, and want the US government to scrutinize them. Some Trump officials have reportedly been sympathetic to their concerns, but the administration hasn’t restricted these Chinese models’ use in the US. Sacks argues that a US ban on Chinese open weight models will just end up enshrining the OpenAI-Anthropic duopoly he so loathes.

Overall, though, on both national security risks and AI safety risks, Sacks and Huang still seem to have the president’s ear. 

On Monday, Sacks was onstage with Huang at the live All-In podcast event discussing the “doomer hoax” when a purportedly impromptu call came through for the Nvidia CEO: It was Trump. 

“The robots are not going to be taking over the world,” Trump said on speakerphone. “That’s not going to happen.”

Then, after speaking for several minutes, Trump added: “David has done an amazing job.”

Throughout the Trump era, Democrats have wrung their hands about how they can win over working-class voters.

Why not ask the Democrats who’ve actually done it?

That’s what Robin Johnson — a political consultant based in rural Illinois, and a part-time political science professor at Monmouth College — set out to do after Donald Trump first won the presidency, asking Democratic state legislators who won tough districts how they pulled it off.

But after Trump’s shocking second win in 2024 revived concern about Democrats’ working-class woes, the time seemed ripe to ask legislators about how they’ve managed to cope with the challenges of a new decade.

So, working with the center-left Progressive Policy Institute and co-authors Stuart Malec and Jolie Libert, Johnson interviewed 28 state legislators who won in heavily working-class areas in the seven main presidential battleground states. 

They include Nevada state Assemblymember Max Carter, a retired union electrician; Michigan state Rep. Tullio Liberati, a construction small business owner; Arizona state Rep. Lorena Austin, a self-described “five-time college dropout” with sleeve tattoos; and Wisconsin state Rep. Karen DeSanto, a nonprofit executive and former professional circus clown.

The report, which Vox reviewed exclusively ahead of its publication, comes amid a factional debate within the party between rising left-wing and socialist candidates who have argued for more far-reaching policy proposals, and more moderate Democrats who have pushed for concessions to working-class cultural sensibilities. In the report, the authors said that lawmakers they focused on “could hardly be more different from the left-wing populists who’ve captivated the national media this summer.” 

Generally, the legislators in the report focused on pocketbook issues, though in different ways — some embraced populist causes, while others positioned themselves as business-friendly. And they broadly agreed that cultural issues were Democrats’ biggest challenge in reaching the working class.

“It’s really interesting how common the themes and the challenges are from rural Georgia, right down to the border of Arizona, to Las Vegas, northern North Carolina, and then up in the ‘Blue Wall’ states,” Johnson told me. 

I spoke to Johnson last week about his findings, and about what these state legislators’ experience has to tell us about the debate over the Democratic Party’s future. Our conversation, which has been condensed and edited, is below.

What’s changed in 10 years of interviewing legislators facing tough races

Walk me through where the idea for this project came from.

I’ve been working on this for 10 years. It started at a conversation at a little diner in Maquoketa, Iowa — a little “choke and puke,” as we call those places. I was with a former state senator from Iowa named Jeff Danielson, and it was right after Trump won. Most of the focus was on what happened at the congressional or presidential level, and we thought, why not take a look at state legislators competing in these tough districts?

I approached my friend and my congresswoman, Cheri Bustos, who I’ve known really well and helped on her campaigns, and said, would you be interested in working with us and sponsoring it? She said, absolutely, because her district, the 17th in Illinois, is rural working-class. And she was able to win these voters.

We talked to probably 75 current and former legislators for that first report. We did another one in 2021, focused on members of Congress and state legislators who win Trump districts. Then we did a third one last year, on Democrats in working-class districts in the heartland. Then she retired from Congress and I went to a PPI conference this past February, and PPI agreed to partner on this with a different focus, slightly — on the seven battleground states, on districts that are really close and have more working-class voters than the national average.

So, having done this several times before, what’s new in the latest version? What are people saying now that they weren’t, necessarily, in previous rounds of this?

In the past, when we focused on the Midwest, it was mostly all white, mostly men, some women. Now, we went to North Carolina and Georgia, and there were African American legislators, men and women. And we went to the West, and there were Latinos.

But what was interesting to me was: Nobody brought up their identity in these interviews. I had to bring it up to one woman from Nevada, mentioning, “Well, you’re Native American.” “Yeah, but I don’t really talk about that much,” was the response. 

That was one big takeaway: Nobody talked about identity. Their focus was totally on their constituents, their working-class constituents. 

What were some of the common themes you saw in the responses?

There’s no secret sauce. They’re deeply rooted in their communities, they know the people that live there, they know the language, they work hard.

But they focus on economic issues. If somebody asks them about cultural issues, they’ll respond, but they try to get back to economic issues, because that’s what they’re hearing about from voters, mostly.

These folks are from a variety of backgrounds. Some are true working-class, they don’t have college degrees. One guy near Detroit runs a construction company, didn’t get a degree. Another woman we focused on from Arizona had tattoos all over and took 14 years to get her BA. Some are the traditional route — attorneys, some small business people.

But it’s a lot of different backgrounds, and we want to contrast that with the consultants who tried to make the perfect Frankenstein candidate out of [former Maine Senate candidate Graham] Platner. These people are out there — you don’t need to create it. They’re out there.

Cultural issues

On how politics has changed over the years, there’s a particularly vivid quote in the report from state Assemblymember Elaine Marzola from Nevada.  

She tells you: “My campaign’s biggest adjustment in 2024 was shifting away from leading with social and cultural issues and instead focusing more directly on affordability and economic concerns.” And she adds, “While I remain progressive on many social issues, voters across backgrounds increasingly want leaders focused on affordability, education, and public safety rather than endless culture war debates.”

How widespread was that sentiment?

It’s very widespread. Their focus is on the issues that matter, that they’re picking up from their constituents. A lot of times they reported that some of the people in their campaigns told them they should talk more about abortion or other social issues — mainly abortion — and they refused to do it. 

A lot of them talked about a major problem in the party being these litmus tests that groups have, that you can vote with them on nine out of 10 issues, but on the tenth issue, if you’re not with them, you’re an enemy. 

If you’re going to have a true big-tent party, you’ve got to have some room for disagreements on some of these issues that reflect the local voters that people have in their districts. Several in Georgia told me pointedly that their leadership understood and would give them passes on votes that they knew they couldn’t be with them on. But in other cases, I heard a lot of pointed comments about these groups demanding 100 percent allegiance, that it’s all or nothing.

In a lot of districts down South, I heard from a couple gentlemen; it’s the Bible Belt. People go to church regularly. African Americans, the older generations of African Americans, are more middle-of-the-road, if not conservative on some of these cultural issues. So there’s got to be room for people to vote their districts on some of these cultural issues.

But on the economic issues, they’re there. They’re unified with the rest of the party. 

Economic issues

Well, it’s interesting on economic issues, because there’s unity on focusing on affordability and pocketbook issues in some form. But you also describe how some people take a more populist approach, and others have a more business-friendly approach. Is there tension there?

We asked people, how would they describe themselves? And most of them describe themselves as moderate. But the range of issues you have at the state level may differ some compared to the federal issues. A true populist approach at the state level may not have the same meaning as a populist at the federal level.

In fact, some of the folks with business backgrounds were pretty aggressive in some of their policy ideas. I think [Assemblymember] Joe Dalia from Nevada is one, he actually combined with [Rep.] Ro Khanna on a policy idea, the congressman from Silicon Valley who’s definitely a progressive. Dalia’s background is in business entrepreneurship.

Is all politics local?

The dynamics are a little different in state legislative races, even tough competitive ones, because there’s just so much less national money, national interest, group interest, virality, all of the dynamics that are so important to national politics. These are truly local races. So do you think these lessons can apply to national politics?

These state legislators are easy to overlook. They’re close enough to the people that they’re in, they can knock doors more than like a member of Congress. You can’t really knock doors in a congressional race — you can do some and have volunteers do it, but these people are out doing it individually. 

But they still get hit on national issues. Some of them didn’t do much TV — Georgia’s got smaller districts — but they’re on TV in Wisconsin. And they’ve got to raise money and then have the party help them out. They’re used to getting hit on national issues because the Republicans try to tie them to some of the more far-left ideas. 

They also feel that the deep roots they have in the community help overcome that because they’re better known, they’re battle-tested in that regard. A lot of times, especially with social media, you think you’re going to come up with some neat little line to put on social media that’s going to carry you to a victory, or some pithy slogan or whatever. It’s really not. For these folks anyway, it just comes down to doing the hard work. 

But this is the bench that the Democrats need. You want to pick some people down the road that have proven ability to win these tough districts — here they are.